Yesterday I stumbled upon SmallBasic, while looking for something else. It is an interesting little project by Microsoft to create an entry level language to teach programming. It is a mix of toned down BASIC and Logo. Since the language (or is it an application) is still in infancy, version 0.5 released recently, I will try not to be too harsh on it.

The Good:

In my first post, I talked about analysing my interests based on delicious bookmarks. This post is to announce that I have cleaned up the script a bit and posted it on this blog. Try it out.

What is delicious trends?

It is a simple visualisation of your online taste. All your bookmarks will be plotted on a time line, helping you to see how your interests evolved over time.

Note: All processing is done in your browser and no data is sent to my server.

Why did I create it?

Once upon a time, not too long ago, I was wondering what interested me. After a while of introspection, I got a lot of answers from my heart, but my mind wanted a quantitative proof. So I decided to look at my bookmarks to find what I bookmarked and when.

How was it created?

A quick (& dirty) mashup of delicious api + jquery + google visualisation plugin. Most of the code is straight out of the samples. My desire was to find the answers I was looking for, ASAP.

Spent the last couple of days looking at Javafx, Sun’s response to Silverlight and Flex. It is an interesting mix of ideas. Clearly inspired by dynamic languages as well as Silverlight. Maybe Flex as well, but I couldn’t tell as I have not tried Flex.

Things I liked:

Type inference: Could have been better, but I will take this any day over the verbose Java alternate

Binding: In fact this is a great thing. Two way binding and binding with expression.

Triggers: Need to explore more, but shows promise.

Timelines: This along with the exceptional support for multimedia will help in creating the next killer app.

Collections: You can iterate over collections in SQL like syntax which,to me, looks better than LINQ.

Strings and Dates: Finally they get treated with the respect they deserve, since most of the time one is juggling text and dates.

Things I am meh about:

Declarative UI design: I believe UI design is best left to designers (software not people)

Using all the available brackets: All examples look like they have used up every possible punctuation mark

:,=,{},[],(),;

Init vs. assignment: The ambiguity on where to use a variable : value and where to use a variable = value

Overall looks good and I am going to spend some time learning the innards of Javafx.

Finally, what I will like to see guidance on how patterns will evolve to address this new form of development. I immediately see a lot of older patterns not longer needed like Singleton, Visitor Pattern, Lazy Loading, Thread Pool Pattern, Observer Pattern and more. Similarly we need to recalibrate a few like the MVC, MVP patterns.

Is it a brave new step to boldly go where no web giant has gone before, or merely a mashup of pre-existing tools? An attempt to capture some enterprise market share or to fundamentally change the way the Internet works? Will we see massive gains in worker productivity or the advent of real-time spam from Nigeria? We discuss!

Hi, this is Hitesh. I am here to talk about stuff I like. How do I know what I like? Well I asked myself the same question and like any true geek looked at the data at hand to decide. So I analysed my bookmarks at delicious and the three areas that interest me way beyond others are programming, education and entrepreneurship.

Thus the focus of this blog will remain these three areas of my interest. My plan is to add at least one post per week, let’s see how it goes.